Sunday, March 26, 2006

Et Tu, Puty-Put?

Putin Accused of Plagiarizing His Ph.D. Thesis "It was really quite common for an up-and-coming apparatchik to get a ghostwritten work done to obtain a degree," he said. "It's probably an open question whether Putin even read his dissertation until shortly before he had to defend it."----Moscow Times 3/27/06quoting E. Wayne Merry, senior associate at the American Foreign Policy CouncilThe Sunday TimesMarch 26, 2006Putin accused of plagiarising his PhD thesisTony Allen-Mills, New York

THE career of President Vladimir Putin of Russia was built at least in part on a lie, according to US researchers. A new study of an economics thesis written by Putin in the mid-1990s has revealed that large chunks of it were copied from an American text.

Putin was labelled a plagiarist yesterday after a pair of researchers at the Brookings Institution, a Washington DC think tank, established that the Russian president’s academic credentials were based on a dissertation he had lifted in part verbatim from the Russian translation of a management study written by two professors at the University of Pittsburgh in 1978......According to Clifford G Gaddy, a senior fellow at Brookings, 16 of the 20 pages that open a key section of Putin’s work were copied either word for word or with minute alterations from a management study, Strategic Planning and Policy, written by US professors William King and David Cleland. The study was translated into Russian by a KGB-related institute in the early 1990s...Putin’s work was entitled “The Strategic Planning of Regional Resources Under the Formation of Market Relations” and was largely an essay on how a state should manage its natural resources. Experts on the former Soviet Union said last week it was common for ambitious “apparatchiks” to seek to inflate their credentials with an impressive-sounding degree, and that there were many cases at the time of officials hiring ghost-writers to produce work they passed off as their own......US scholars say that his academic studies in the mid-1990s may have been intended to impress the western investors who were flooding into the rapidly modernising Russian city.“Somebody was cutting corners,” Gaddy added, “whether it was Mr Putin or whoever cut and pasted the work for him.”See the entire article here:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-2101607,00.html

Moscow Times reported the same story on March 27 and observed:Dubious academic credential-building was common in Eastern Europe and especially in East Germany, where Putin once served as a KGB agent, E. Wayne Merry, senior associate at the American Foreign Policy Council, told The Washington Times. "It was really quite common for an up-and-coming apparatchik to get a ghostwritten work done to obtain a degree," he said. "It's probably an open question whether Putin even read his dissertation until shortly before he had to defend it." http://www.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2006/03/27/011.html